Penetralia II: Welcome To Me
Curated by Zoë De Luca Legge
17 December—27 January 2024
The project is supported by Frame Contemporary Art Finland
Almanac Inn is supported by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT and Regione Piemonte.
The word penetralia typically refers to the most private and embedded architecture of a building or temple. Ellie Rae Hunter and Anni Puolakka's dialogic show builds upon the namesake 2018 film, which tells the story of a person whose memory of an early sexual encounter with the bubbling waters of a jacuzzi is triggered when she moves into an apartment above an all-male sauna. Heat, sounds, and condensation from the sauna seep into the flat and the protagonist finds herself impregnated with a swarm of fishing lures. The collaborative project explored entanglements, boundaries, and transformative relations between beings and materials. Five years later, Penetralia II further develops the artists' research into the porosity of architectures and bodies through a series of individual works and a spatial intervention.
To represent a body is not so much to passively witness its existence but rather to actively contribute to its materialization, that is, to its construction as a political subject within society and as an object of knowledge within nature. The body explores the fantasies, stories, and imagery we create to come to terms with the realities of inter-material coexistence. In Penetralia II, Hunter and Puolakka’s works merge autobiographical and fictional narratives to delve into the ways these elements interact with our psychological and anatomical selves. The exploration focuses on how unintentional or unexpected encounters with the other can unveil profound insights about our existence and potential beyond, suggesting a paradigm that rejects the notion of the other in favor of an openly intertwined and integrated ethos.
Ellie Rae Hunter’s series The Fixers (2023) consists of four life-size aqua resin molds of the artist's back. Each of the versions is embedded with aluminum casts of miniature objects: a set of plates, a rug with a cat on it, and a robe on a hook. These framed body portions hold as many dollhouse portions, highlighting the body's containing - and even playful - nature. Portion within portion, cast within cast. This metaphysical remapping reminds us of the psychological architectures that become lodged in our physical forms; That bodies are composed of many elements, and that some of them may be nonhuman animals. Be they intimate but external, familiar but uncomfortable, it is the outside that shapes the inside.
Welcome to Me (2023) is a site-specific installation that blends all the abovementioned speculations in one, human-scale yet inaccessible environment. In a sense, a penetralia takes shape within the gallery walls. A diamond-shaped nest of painted fabric catalyzes all open questions, highlighting the need to assume a humorous and light-hearted mindset to answer them. The metaphor of the body temple shifts to a less sacred, more playful one. To address serious topics with a different take on what normal expectations are embedded in us; To remind us that humor opens new and less rigid ways of thinking about the body, sexuality, and pleasure.
–excerpts from press release by Zoe De Luca Legge